My first wire tree AND how to rescue burnt oven baked clay

If you, like me, have made a grave mistake by purchasing a cheap mini oven for baking clay, this post may be especially of use to you.

The problems with temperature, the uneven spreading of heat inside such mini ovens... it seems like they can just live their own lives and ignore whatever you set on their mode switches. So, you sometimes end up with half-burnt, partially or even fully burnt polymer clay creations.

While sometimes they're beyond saving, other times you could try and rescue your painstakingly crafted jewellery or gifts.

So, here are the methods I know of:

Mask by painting over the burns with acrylic paint. This presumes that the burned areas aren't disfigured, just the color has turned brown or black. Paint over, then - optionally - apply matt or glossy finish for polymer clay. Here's my real life example with burnt green and yellow beads:

Mask the burns by wrapping aluminum foil around the affected details. Alternatively, try gluing something on top: chips, glitter... Here's the story of my first wire tree, which I've made using polymer clay as 'fruits' and 'soil'. It was looking like this before I put it in the oven:

Afterwards, I've found that some 'fruits' burnt ho the point of distortion, they've been evidently almost boiling and so no painting over them would help. So I thought of cooking foil. It matched my silvery wire so it seemed like a good alternative (to throwing the creation away).

Get rid of the burns by bleaching your item. This advice comes from threesmittenkittens.com and I haven't tried it myself.